Photo: Left to right first row: Mid-Career Artists Iván Candeo (Venezuela), Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica), Marcelo Silveira (Brazil); Left to right second row: Emerging Artists Liliana García (Colombia), Abiniel João do Nascimento (Brazil), Christian Salablanca Díaz (Costa Rica); Left to right third row: Emerging Artist Priscilla Romero-Cubero and CIFO-Ars Electronica Awarded Artists Berenice Olmedo Peña (Mexico), and Lorena Solis Bravo (Peru). Miami, Florida (December 4^th, 2025) – The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program to be showcased in an exhibition highlighting new works by nine artists recipients representing six Latin American countries. On view at Real Fábrica de Artillería, Seville from October 2026, the exhibit continues the international itinerancies of the CIFO Grants & Commissions Program exhibition.

On this edition, CIFO will present 9 award-winning artists, divided into three categories: Mid-Career Artists— Iván Candeo (Venezuela), Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica), Marcelo Silveira (Brazil); Emerging Artists— Liliana García (Colombia), Abiniel João do Nascimento (Brazil), Priscilla Romero-Cubero (Costa Rica), Christian Salablanca Díaz (Costa Rica); and CIFO-Ars Electronica Awarded Artists— Berenice Olmedo Peña (Mexico), Lorena Solís Bravo (Peru).

Alongside the award recipients, the selection committees also acknowledged the remarkable proposals of eight artists that reached the final stage of consideration in the different categories: Virginia Errázuriz (Chile), Ana Teresa Barboza (Peru), Edgar Guzmán Ruiz (Colombia), La Cholla Jackson (Costa Rica), Romina Chuls (Peru), Brisa Noronha (Brazil) and in the CIFO-Ars Electronica Awards, Arte+Ciencia and Bios ex Machina (Mexico) and Indira Montoya (Argentina). 

“Once again, we continue CIFO´s mission of promoting the international visibility of artists from the region by supporting the creation of new projects through the Grants & Commissions Program, which will be presented for the first time in Spain” said Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, CIFO’s Founder and Honorary President. “We look forward to next year’s exhibition, which will mark the debut of the newly produced works by this wonderful group of artists, representing a diverse range of backgrounds, aesthetics, nationalities, and artistic pursuits.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

MID-CAREER ARTISTS

Iván Candeo (Caracas, Venezuela, 1983) is a Venezuelan artist whose intermedial practice examines the regimes of visibility that shape historical consciousness, focusing on the intersections between image, temporality, and the structures of representation. Trained initially at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador and later earning an M.A. in History and Theory of the Plastic Arts from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Candeo continued his postgraduate studies in Spain, completing the Máster LAV—Laboratorio de Prácticas Audiovisuales Contemporáneas in Madrid, as well as the Master’s Program in Comparative Studies of Literature, Art, and Thought at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His recent solo exhibitions include Hay un Goya en la sopa (Alarcón Criado, Sevilla, 2022) and Antes que, mientras que, más tarde (Carmen Araujo Arte, Caracas, 2021). He is the recipient of the Armando Reverón Prize (65º Salón Arturo Michelena, 2010) and the AVAP Young Artist Award (2012). His work has been presented internationally in institutions and biennials across Latin America and Europe.

Candeo’s artistic inquiry probes the thresholds between documentation and fiction, examining how mediated images participate in the construction—and distortion—of historical narrative.

Priscilla Monge (San José, Costa Rica, 1968) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, video, photography, and performance. Her work interrogates power relations, gendered hierarchies and the invisible structures underpinning everyday life. Monge’s work has been exhibited in major international venues, including the Venice Biennale (2001, 2013) and the Liverpool Biennial (2008). Her installations and photographic series have been shown at institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), MoMA PS1 (New York) and the Brooklyn Museum (New York). Public and private collections that hold her work include the Tate Modern (London), the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC, San José), and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taipei). Monge’s recent solo exhibition “Questions of Life and Death” at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo (CGAC, Santiago de Compostela) in 2025 traced the development of her practice from its formative years, emphasizing her incisive visual language that couples everyday forms with latent violence and poetic irony. Through her work, Monge challenges conditioned modes of looking and the discipline of the feminine body, offering instead a site of reflection on how intimate gestures become carriers of cultural critique. 

Marcelo Silveira (Gravatá, Brazil, 1962) is a Brazilian artist whose practice examines the intersections between sculpture, material culture, and archival systems. Based in Recife, Silveira works with processes of collecting, ordering, and reconfiguring found and vernacular materials—including wood, leather, glass, rulers, and discarded objects—constructing installations and sculptural ensembles that reflect on the circulation, decay, and preservation of everyday matter. His solo exhibitions include Hotel Solidão (Galeria Nara Roesler, New York, 2022) and Compacto com pacto (Sesc Triunfo, 2019). He has participated in the 1st Bienal Internacional de Buenos Aires (2000), the 4th Bienal de Valencia (2007) and the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010), among other group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. Silveira’s work is represented in several public collections, including the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP) and the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (MAMAM), Recife.

Through strategies of categorization, repetition, and material reuse, Silveira’s practice foregrounds the relationship between object, memory, and socio-cultural histories, proposing a critical reading of how value and meaning are constructed through acts of collecting and display.

EMERGING ARTISTS

Liliana García (Medellín, Colombia 1977) investigates the spatial and corporeal conditions of normalized architectures and the hidden mechanics of function and dysfunction. Her practice centers on bodies subject to alteration, and on environments—urban and domestic—that render the functional visible through their failings. Her solo exhibition No puedo creer lo que mis ojos ven (Galería La Cometa, Medellín, 2023) presented an extended inquiry into the perceptual limits and adaptive strategies of bodies situated outside “standard” systems of access and design. García´s work has been shown in group contexts such as El sueño de las cosas (Galería La Cometa, 2025) and in institutional galleries that address questions of accessibility and body-space relations. By rendering visible the often-invisible disjunctions between body and architecture, García prompts viewers to reconsider normative assumptions of ability, space, and mobility. Her objects and installations are both material investigations and interventions in how built environments condition experience and difference. 

Abiniel João do Nascimento (Carpina, Brazil, 1996) is a Brazilian multi-platform artist and researcher based in Recife whose work examines the intersections of spirituality, territoriality, and corporeality against the continuing structures of coloniality. They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Museology from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE, 2022). Nascimento is a member of the Black and Indigenous Art Collective CARNI and the research group DesAyiê, and has been invited as a resident at institutions such as the Villa Arson, France (2024) under a cross-residency program. Their artistic practice — which includes sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance — engages a methodological formula they term the Relation of Coloniality (RC = RA + RT), where the Archival Relation (RA) and the Land Relation (RT) converge to trace how the material and immaterial are formed under colonial conditions. 

Through a poetic oriented by territory and memory, Nascimento re-orients questions of identity, ancestry and plant, animal, and mineral temporalities, thereby repositioning the archive as a site of resistance and re-mapping the body as a terrain of cultural and ecological convergence. 

Priscilla Romero-Cubero (San José, Costa Rica, 1984) is a visual artist and scholar whose work traverses expanded print‐making and contemporary practices of the body. She holds a Ph.D. cum laude in Art: Production and Research from the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and holds a longstanding academic post at the Universidad Nacional of Costa Rica. Her practice is anchored in the innovation of latexgraphy, a bespoke technique she developed to register and reproduce epidermal surfaces as graphic matrices, thereby situating skin as text, archive, and surface of memory. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations in Poland and group exhibitions across Costa Rica, Spain, the United States and Brazil. She is 2025 winner of the National Visual Arts Salon (Costa Rica) and recipient of the Special Prize at the Kraków International Print Triennial (Poland). 

Through her investigation of the body’s surface and collective trace, Romero-Cubero renders visible the mark of individual and communal histories, and reconfigures print‐based media as sites of embodied inquiry.

Christian Salablanca Díaz (Guararí, Costa Rica, 1990) holds a degree in Arts and Visual Communication, with an emphasis on sculpture, from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. His interdisciplinary practice — including drawing, installation, video, and sound — investigates violence as both lived experience and cultural formation, examining how power, memory, non-human beings, and territory converge to shape historical imaginaries and alternative knowledges. Notable projects include Geometría del centro (2020), commissioned by TBA21 and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, which traces correspondences between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Costa Rica’s Guayabo Monument through charcoal drawings, field recordings and site-specific inscriptions. He has participated in significant residencies including at Gasworks (London). Salablanca’s work is featured in prominent international exhibitions and the collection of KADIST.

His practice reframes embodied and territorial violence by detouring through mythologies, animal-metaphors, and alternative epistemologies, thereby re-casting the archive as a site of both resistance and material enunciation.

CIFO-ARS ELECTRONICA AWARD

Berenice Olmedo Peña (Mexico City, 1987) develops a sculptural practice that examines the body as a site where medical, technological, and institutional forces intersect. Working with prosthetics, orthotic devices, biomedical materials and industrial fabrication processes, her work engages questions of functionality, dependency, and the politics of care. Olmedo holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), studies in philosophy from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, and advanced research in anthropology, sociology and aesthetics in Mexico and Germany. Her exhibitions include presentations at Jan Kaps (Cologne), Fanta-MLN (Milan), Marta Herford (Germany), Galería Jáguer (Mexico City), and La Casa Encendida (Madrid). Her work has also been shown in institutional contexts that examine embodiment, normativity, and disability as structural categories within contemporary visual culture. Olmedo’s sculptures and installations form part of public and private collections in Europe and Latin America, including Art Collection Telekom (Germany) and the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico).

Through an approach grounded in material study and biomedical histories, Olmedo’s work repositions the assisted body as a critical agent, foregrounding the social and political infrastructures that configure movement, vulnerability, and support.

Lorena Solís Bravo (Lima, Peru, 1991) is a visual artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, installation, text, and performance, with a research-driven focus on the entanglements between human and non-human agencies. They studied Film and Television at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) and completed a BFA in Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, in 2017. Solís Bravo examines biological, mineral, and technological processes—bacterial activity, viral transmission, parasitic relations, vegetal intelligence—within frameworks informed by decolonial science studies and speculative ecologies.Their work has been presented in exhibitions and screenings internationally, including projects developed through residencies at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture (Utrecht), KAIR—Košice Artist in Residence (Slovakia) and CIKE Creative Industry Košice. Their film The Guest, the Host and the Ghost has been screened in contemporary art contexts for its inquiry into interspecies communication and material intelligence. By approaching matter as an active collaborator rather than inner substance, Solís Bravo constructs environments in which micro- and macro-temporalities intersect. 

Their practice proposes alternative ontologies of coexistence that unsettle anthropocentric narratives and foreground the permeability of bodies, ecosystems, and technological systems.

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About the CIFO Grants & Commissions Program

The CIFO Grants & Commissions Program offers emerging, mid-career and established contemporary Latin American artists the opportunity to develop and present new work to international audiences. To date CIFO has awarded more than 170 artists and dedicated over $2.5 million in funds through the program. Each year, artists are nominated by CIFO’s Honorary Advisory Committee, which is composed of leading art professionals, curators and artists from Latin America, the United States and Europe. After a rigorous review process, the applicants are shortlisted by the Selection Committee and the winners chosen by the CIFO Board of Directors. The program has been known to springboard its recipients to the next level of their careers.

About CIFO

Ella Fontanals-Cisneros established the non-profit Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in 2002. The foundation’s mission is to support and foster cultural understanding and educational dialog among Latin American artists and global audiences. CIFO serves as a platform for emerging, mid-career and established Latin American artists through the Grants & Commissions Program, the CIFO Collection, and other related art and cultural projects in the United States of America and internationally. 

For more information about the exhibitions and other programs, please visit cifo.org, and follow CIFO on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.